Ecuador’s raid on the Mexican embassy shows how foreign policy is often governed by personal politics, not national interest.
Ecuador was once famous for harboring a fugitive: for seven years it allowed WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to remain in its embassy in London, invoking an international treaty that makes diplomatic headquarters places of refuge.
Last week, the South American nation appeared to tear up that treaty by sending police to the Mexican embassy in Quito — in the face of protests from Mexico — where it detained a former vice president accused of corruption.
Ecuador’s President Daniel Noboa defended the decision to detain former Vice President Jorge Glas, calling him a criminal and citing the country’s growing security crisis to justify the measure.
But his critics said it was one of the most egregious violations of the treaty since its creation in 1961. They saw a more personal motive: Noboa’s political agenda.
Ecuador has been mired in record levels of violence, and Noboa, a young center-right leader, is eager to convey the image that he is tough on crime. He is just days away from a national referendum that, if approved, would give him sweeping new powers to tackle insecurity and potentially help him get re-elected next year.
Noboa called the embassy raid and Glas’ arrest a way to show Ecuador that it is working hard to pursue accused criminals.
But, according to several analysts, his government’s decision to force its way into the embassy is one of the most egregious examples of a dynamic that has become all too familiar around the world, and Latin America is no exception: a political foreign policy driven less by noble principles or national interest and more by the personal goals of leaders hoping to preserve their own political future.
“Foreign policy has never been pure, it has often been motivated by national or individual political interests,” said Dan Restrepo, who was President Barack Obama’s top advisor for Latin America. “But on the American continent there has certainly been an intensification of the personal in recent years.”
Across the region, diplomatic rhetoric has deteriorated, with presidents lashing out at each other with a barrage of insults that may seem petty on the world stage but have the potential to make them look good at home, especially to their ideological underpinnings.
President Gustavo Petro, leader of the Colombian left, has been in conflict since last year with the right-wing president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele. Petro accused Bukele of running prisons like “concentration camps,” and Bukele noted that Petro’s son faced allegations of corruption.
“Everything is good at home?” Bukele wrote sarcastically on platform X.
Argentina’s right-wing president, Javier Milei, has clashed with Petro, whom he recently called a “terrorist killer,” prompting Petro to expel Argentine diplomats. (He later reinstated them).
Milei has also argued with President Andrés Manuel López Obrador of Mexico, calling him “ignorant” and once referring to his supporters as members of the “short penis club.” In turn, López Obrador has called Milei an “ultra-conservative facho.”
The dispute between Mexico and Ecuador first arose in December, when the Mexican embassy in Ecuador allowed Glas to remain there after being received “as a guest,” Mexico’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said.
López Obrador then drew the ire of Ecuador when he publicly questioned the legitimacy of its presidential election, prompting Noboa’s government to expel the Mexican ambassador. It was the third time that a Latin American country expelled a Mexican ambassador since López Obrador took office in 2018.
The dispute continued to escalate, until police finally raided the embassy and arrested Glas last week.
On Tuesday, in his daily press conference, López Obrador called the detention at the embassy in Ecuador “a violation not only of the sovereignty of our country, but of international law.”
Mexico has a long history of offering refuge to dissidents. But the government did not clarify why it ultimately granted Glas asylum, leading critics to question whether Mexico’s president, a longtime standard-bearer for the country’s left, was simply trying to protect an ideological ally. Glas was part of a left-wing government.
“What is the national interest in terms of the position of Ecuador or Mexico in the world? That is a question for which no one has an answer, because there is none,” said Carlos Bravo Regidor, a political analyst based in Mexico City. “There are the personal or ideological reasons of the leaders, and that’s all.”
Ecuador’s detention of Glas seems a marked departure from its own willingness to house Assange in its embassy in London for so long.
Assange is accused of violating the US Espionage Act with WikiLeaks’ publication of classified military and diplomatic documents.
He was allowed into the Ecuadorian embassy by its president at the time, Rafael Correa, a leftist who had an antagonistic relationship with the United States.
But then President Lenín Moreno took office in Ecuador, and tried to distance himself from Correa and build friendlier relations with the United States. It was the Moreno government that allowed Assange’s subsequent arrest.
The WikiLeaks founder remains in British custody and is fighting to avoid extradition to the United States.
Glas was vice president under Correa, who was convicted of corruption charges in 2020 and has escaped prison by living abroad. López Obrador recently praised Correa for his “very good government.”
(After Glas was transferred to a detention center, authorities in Ecuador said on Monday that he was found in a coma. On Tuesday, the prison authority announced that his condition had improved and he was returned to prison.)
Overall, López Obrador has prioritized domestic politics, traveling abroad infrequently and focusing instead on large infrastructure projects and social programs at home.
Much of López Obrador’s outward attention has focused on his relationship with the United States, where he has gained significant influence due to his role in managing the migration crisis.
However, López Obrador has also been a staunch defender of leftist governments in the region. In 2022, he snubbed Joe Biden’s administration by refusing to attend a summit hosted by the United States because it excluded Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela.
In a dramatic episode, López Obrador’s government sent a military plane to bring former Bolivian President Evo Morales to Mexico City in 2019.
Mexico also sheltered Morales allies in its diplomatic headquarters in Bolivia’s capital, prompting the country to expel Mexico’s ambassador.
In late 2022, Mexico granted asylum to the family of Peru’s deposed leftist president Pedro Castillo, who was in jail after an attempt to dissolve Congress. Peru responded by expelling the Mexican ambassador.
López Obrador later insisted that Castillo was the “legal and legitimate president of Peru,” and accused the country’s government of “racism” for imprisoning Castillo.
Provocative comments, according to experts, are part of a pattern. Although López Obrador has said that the pillar of his foreign policy is not to interfere in the internal affairs of other countries—and to expect others to treat Mexico the same way—he has not been afraid to express his own opinions on domestic politics. of some of his neighbors.
“It is surprising that a president who says that the principle of non-intervention guides Mexico’s foreign policy, pronounces on the internal political affairs of these two countries without justification,” said Natalia Saltalamacchia, head of international studies at the Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico. , referring to Peru and Ecuador.
Diplomatic squabbles can have real-world effects at a time when addressing some of the region’s biggest problems—migration, climate change and transnational crime—requires regional cooperation.
In Ecuador, police say Mexico’s most powerful cartels, Sinaloa and Jalisco Nueva Generación, are funding an expanding drug trafficking industry that has fueled violence and death.
If the Noboa government “really wanted to confront organized crime,” said Agustín Burbano de Lara, an Ecuadorian political analyst, “what we would have to have is closer collaboration with Mexico, not this impasse diplomat with Mexico.”
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